Experiences with PDG-Based IFC

Information flow control systems provide the guarantees that are required in today’s security-relevant systems. While the literature has produced a wealth of techniques to ensure a given security policy, there is only a small number of implementations, and even these are mostly restricted to theoretical languages or a subset of an existing language. Previously, we presented the theoretical foundations and algorithms for dependence-graph-based information flow control (IFC). As a complement, this paper presents the implementation and evaluation of our new approach, the first implementation of a dependence-graph based analysis that accepts full Java bytecode. It shows that the security policy can be annotated in a succinct manner; and the evaluation shows that the increased runtime of our analysis—a result of being flow-, context-, and object-sensitive—is mitigated by better analysis results and elevated practicability. Finally, we show that the scalability of our analysis is n...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ESSOS
• Authors: Christian Hammer
• Keywords: ESSOS 2010, Information flow Control, Program Dependence Graph, Security Policy, Software Engineering